re: Share your favorite quotes

quote:"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion [that violence never settles anything] is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

"This is probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone." -John Kennedy during a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere.

When Voltaire was on his deathbed a priest came to him and said, “You should renounce the devil,” and Voltaire replied, “This is no time to be making enemies.”

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” – Horace Mann

“Don’t forget to love yourself.” – Soren Kierkegaard

“One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” - Mark Twain

“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.” - Benjamin Franklin

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” - Albert Camus

“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” – Albert Camus

“Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.” – Albert Camus

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.” – Albert Camus

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” – Soren Kierkegaard

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see.” – Soren Kierkegaard

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind." - Bertrand Russell

quote:Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

quote:Going to the mountains is going home.

quote:One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. That mountains, long conceived, are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes

quote:The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains

Muir was a fascinating guy. Married into wealth and was put to work managing a farm (vineyard, I believe) and he became very ill. His wife finally told him to go back to the mountains to get well again.

Muir and Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary basically founded Haines, the town I will retire to and think is the most awesome place on earth, 70 miles North of here. Muir himself said it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

You got a shitload of love for the French existentialist. I have dealt with the French the French that grew up with those ideas being in the fore of thier development. Don't go down that path is my word of advice.

quote:Oh come on. Don't be mad just because I made you look stupid with the SQ/Change definition. Keep reading my posts and someday you will be a libertarian.

FWIW, if you change liberal to progressive, the definitions he gave are a standard way for the US government to describe political movements in foreign countries. Example: Taliban is known as conservative, despite the chronology of its existence or relationship to the changing culture of afghanistan in the 50s and early 60s (considered progressive). while I don't that I agree or disagree with these definitions, I think it successfully avoids the important analysis of political mechanics.